The Beautiful
by AEsob
Summary: How far can you push someone before they start pushing back? How brutally can one kill a dream before it fights back? All their little group of Altmers wanted to do was change the rigidity of their society. But their whole world was burned down for that. But what the authorities don't realise is that they will create their world, one way, or another.
Revolution in their minds - the children start to march
Against the world in which they have to live  
Oh the hate that's in their hearts

They're tired of being pushed around  
and told just what to do

They'll fight the world until they've won  
and love comes flowing through

* * *

5th of Hearthfire 3E 430

City of Shimmerene, Central Summerset Isles

* * *

The crowd was cheering.

Good. They should be cheering.

It was late in the evening, considerably later than that considered normal for a public appearance by a royal.

The city of lights was sparkling. The tall spires and the grey stone felt dull and tired for my tired eyes.

There was straight, ribbed ugliness here, no contours, and no colours. It was dull, grey and morose.

The entire city was as jagged and bony as an Altmer's skeleton.

Why do most Altmer think like this, I lament. They did not learn how to appreciate roundness; they did not learn the beauty of the colour.

They were given an island full of colour, the colour of the Blue Ocean, of the green fields, the colour of the forests, of the animals.

Did they try to do something with it? No. They did not.

Instead they cut jagged sharp projections of themselves into stones.

And they turned themselves into stones.

Yes. Stones.

For everything about an Altmer was made of stones.

His appearance is stony, his countenance is stony, his mood was stony, his city is stony, his society is stony and his art is the stoniest of all. In fact, if I was told that the Altmer were made out of stone, I would have readily agreed.

What the truth was, that our authorities had fed us lies for so long. They were afraid, deeply traditionalist.

So they stayed with their tradition, believing themselves to be the best and shunning and banning and deporting any indication that they were not.

While the rest of the world grew, we stayed locked up, afraid of the brave new world waiting for us to make our marks on.

While we could have grown into something large, something else, we decided to stay in our little closets of traditionalism, of societal caste, we threw away merit, we trod on the poor.

While the rich danced on the bones of the poor and kept the rest of us locked in our perceived sophistication of our ridiculously backward society and sang praises of the crock of shit that passes as education, the rest of the world advanced.

Ceylinderin, Valmcamo, Celith, Caynmarin and me, Rurindil

We ventured into the brave new world, seeking to leave a mark, seeking to make untold riches. Instead, the world made a mark on us.

Our art was poor, inferior, our literature was lacking. Our architecture was morbid, pointy and gloomy.

Indeed. For our art had limited us to the great glory of Auri-El, and the angular beauty of our great queen and the hugeness of a proper Altmer's forehead.

Our literature was focused on how the great, discerning gentlemerly Altmer prince chased after his angularly ugly princess who had been captured by and never tried to escape from the goblins of another Altmer gentlemer who had given too much freedom to those below him, and cared for mainlanders, and so was murdered by an Imperial who had schemed with the lowly goblins to take over the prince's political power and his city. Along the way there was an idiotic 'low-caste' Altmer peasant who was treated like shite by said prince and was there to provide comic relief.

And our ugly monuments might as well be lived in by the denizens of fiery Oblivion. With their angles and ribs and points and spires I'm sure that they'd fit right in there.

So we tried to change that.

We painted something new, like the immense beauty of nature, like Breton bards at a social club, like peasants harvesting their months of hard work, like abstractism and thought laden paintings. And we wrote new stories, with new ideas, where the heroine rescued the hero from the clutches of an evil prince with the help of a very intelligent peasant and her friends. Like the story of the struggle of Mainlanders who tried to make a living in Alinor, the stories of the hardships of peasants, the stories about the poor goblins who were forced into slavery.

We made a salon; we called it, 'The Beautiful', for we sought to enhance what was beautiful in Summerset.

We set up art shows, and we distributed pamphlets, and we distributed our books.

We wanted the people to read something new, to enjoy something new.

We wrote about youth, of Elven oppression, of the authorities that broke our backs, of the rich that crushed the poor.

We wanted growth, we wanted Beauty.

And the people came.

They liked it; they were enthralled by a new world they had never seen before. They saw the beauty of the forest, of the glittering blue seas, of the moving trees of Valenwood, of the magnificent beauty of a Vvardenfell sunset. Or the sun's first rays touching the throat of the world, immortalised in our art.

The peasants laughed as they saw literature that sympathised with their problems, the stories where they could eat the food they wanted to and wear the clothes they wanted to without fearing the sumptuary laws. The children loved the new tales, of how a Bosmeri trickster was fooled by a Nedic merchant, of how an Imperial traveller solved the riddle of the man-monster in Hammerfell, where it had claimed a passage as its territory and would kill any who would not answer it.

We thought we had created our own world. A world where men, mer, high caste, or low caste, rich or poor did not matter and all were free and equal, a world where merit, and merit alone would decide a person's position in life.

We believed we had achieved something beautiful.

But we had made a mistake.

After the King of Shimmerene had blown too much money on his lavish trips and new mansions and parties and when he found that he had a deficit in his funds, he decreed that Mainlanders were free to be claimed as slaves, and only the ones who could pay the freedom tax would maintain their freedom, and no mainlander could leave the city limits, we wrote a rousing essay protesting against it.

For we were the voice of the youth and we refused to bow down to the whims of a sadistic King who refused to look after his subjects.

Protests started.

Peasants and beggars and prostitutes and mainlanders and the poor and the middle class and the young...they rose up. They protested against it.

And what did the King do?

He requested the assistance of the Emperor of Summerset, a pompous bastard who went by that title even though he was part of the Septim Empire, to crush the protest.

Then they sought us out, they burnt down our workshop.

They destroyed our printing press.

Two years of hard work, of dreams, turned into black soot.

They burned the beauty we had created to the ground.

It was then that we realised we had made a mistake.

Ah well, no mistake repeated blows to the back of the head with a truncheon every day for a year won't cure.

They put us in the dungeons, in a six foot by six foot room with a three inch window for ventilation.

When they opened the door to beat me I'd at least be able to breathe for a while. But I had to hear

By the time they let us out I knew what we had to do.

I had learnt a lesson, no; we had all learnt a lesson: New things have to be built on the ashes of the old.

They changed us. First we felt joy when we created our little worlds. Now we felt joy as we watched monuments of the old turn into dust.

We felt happy after reading a new, finished novel. A novel we had made. But now, we felt happy when we heard bones pop out of their sockets.

Personally, I was a man of art, so I enjoyed the flow of arterial spray that covered everything in red; I enjoyed the whistle air made as it passed through a hole or a snag in a throat.

On Summerset Isles, there were two kinds of monuments, the glories of stone of a long dead and boring past, and the living monuments of flesh-stone that glorified the long dead and boring past, and also decided who would eat what and wear what.

For our society to be changed, we needed to remove these two kinds of monuments from our nation. For the waters of knowledge to flow one must first de-silt the stream. We wished to remove the silt too.

So there I was, standing hooded in an unbuttoned black robe, waiting for the right opportunity.

My shortsword was curved, tempered and weighted correctly, a silver death's head mask was hidden in my satchel below the robe.

Then I noticed the snooty princess move closer to the crowd. This was supposedly the best day in her life.

Her twisted happiness radiated off her.

Not for much longer, though.

I moved silently through the crowd, as silent as the night herself, and secured the mask on my face.

It was showtime.

In the muted torchlight I burst into the opening, slicing through the neck of the first guard in a rush, the curve had killed him before he could even raise his hands.

And I saw her eyes.

They were afraid, of my mask, of my clothes damp with blood spray.

They were all frozen. They had accepted their fate perhaps? Maybe they had been afraid of me? Perhaps they couldn't believe what was happening?

What did it matter?

The curved shortsword dug into her angular ribcage, and through her heart, and before the bony bitch could react, a bladed, sliver paintbrush was in her neck.

I felt its lubdubs through my steel.

I sliced through her heart, brought the bloody blade out and I stabbed into her face. Again, and again and again.

We were all in a haze. The guards, the spectators, the deceased corpse of the princess and even me.

Perhaps they still couldn't believe what was happening.

But both me and the guards broke out of that sweet trance.

They had surrounded me. There was surely no escape, unless...

The nearby chantry of the eight, for the Altmer had refused to accept the ninth, exploded in flames. The diversion had worked, and my friends had gotten very good at the timing.

I cut into the first distracted guard in front of me, and I ran.

I laughed as I sprinted, and soon my laughter was joined by four others.

We were having the time of our lives.

The message was clear; we were coming for the monuments of the old.

That was the start of something Beautiful.

* * *

 **A/N: This is the Beautiful.**

 **We are not perhaps as violent as this stupid author's author fanfic 'Nerevar Reborn'about a psychopath Nerevarine running amok dismembering people, but our story and his story will meet at a certain point one day, and that day, blood will flow through the streets of every city in Summerset.**

 **So, the rating can go up to 'M'.**

 **The stupid author said that he'd like to thank his brother Vikingbardofragnarok, J3M8LACK, Vanillathunder215 and Countess Z for all their help with ideas and generally talking to him.**

 **He also mentioned that Vikingbardofragnarok helped him write the story.**

 **He also said that people are to read this and review so that he can continue with renewed zeal.**

 **So take pity on the fool.**


End file.
